Narrative-Driven Camera Control for Cinematic Replay of Computer Games

International audienceThis paper presents a system that generates cinematic replays for dialogue-based 3D video games. The system exploits the narrative and geometric information present in these games and automatically computes camera framings and edits to build a coherent cinematic replay of the gaming session. We propose a novel importance-driven approach to cinematic replay. Rather than relying on actions performed by characters to drive the cinematography (as in idiom-based approaches), we rely on the importance of characters in the narrative. We first devise a mechanism to compute the varying importance of the characters. We then map importances of characters with different camera specifications, and propose a novel technique that (i) automatically computes camera positions satisfying given specifications, and (ii) provides smooth camera motions when transitioning between different specifications. We demonstrate the features of our system by implementing three camera behaviors (one for master shots, one for shots on the player character, and one for reverse shots). We present results obtained by interfacing our system with a full-fledged serious game (Nothing for Dinner) containing several hours of 3D animated content

Putting the Video Back in Video Games: Opportunities and Challenges for Visual Studies Approaches to Video Game Analysis

I argue for the application of visual studies in video game analysis. This approach presents opportunities for the intersectional analysis of video game visuals as games are brought into dialogue with other visual media like film and painting. This approach also presents challenges due to ontological distinctions between different media as well as due to academic divisions regarding the study of different art and media objects. Despite the challenges presented, a visual studies approach is particularly useful as a critical window into contemporary visual culture at large. I outline the fields of game studies and visual studies, marking their distinctions as well as the areas in which they overlap. I provide examples of visual studies approaches to video game analysis through an emphasis on the visual characteristics of video games. As visual studies is generally considered an interdisciplinary endeavor, I contextualize my analyses through comparisons with other visual media, in particular finding intersections with art history and film studies. Specifically, I argue that perspective is an integral visual trait of many video games, relating the use of linear perspective and isometric perspective, used in some genres of games, with the development of perspective in painting. I examine various cinematic techniques used in video games and discuss their ideological potency. I also cover ways in which video games subvert conventional norms, such as through self-reflexivity, to open up novel avenues for visual expression

Techniques de mise en scène pour le jeu vidéo et l'animation

Eurographics State of the Art Report (STAR).International audienceOver the last forty years, researchers in computer graphics have proposed a large variety of theoretical models and computer implementations of a virtual film director, capable of creating movies from minimal input such as a screenplay or storyboard. The underlying film directing techniques are also in high demand to assist and automate the generation of movies in computer games and animation. The goal of this survey is to characterize the spectrum of applications that require film directing, to present a historical and up-to-date summary of research in algorithmic film directing, and to identify promising avenues and hot topics for future research.Depuis quarante ans, les chercheurs en informatique graphique ont proposé une grande variété de modèles théoriques et d'implémentations de réalisateurs virtuels, capables de créer des films automatiquement à partir de scénarios ou de storyboards. Les techniques de mise en scène sous-jacentes peuvent également être très utiles pour assister et automatiser la création de films dans le jeu vidéo et l'animation. Le but de cet état de l'art est de caractériser le spectre des applications qui peuvent bénéficier des techniques de mise en scène, de donner un compte rendu historique de la recherche en mise en scène algorithmique, et d'identifier les tendances et perspectives du domaine

Experiments in the Use of Game Technology for Pre- Visualization

This overview paper outlines the value of real-time 3D engines for pre-visualization. Pre- visualization is a standard tool during pre-production of many modern film productions. First, the parallels between the two increasingly digitized technologies are discussed. Second, the paper outlines the special needs and problems posed by pre-visualization, and argues that animation control and camera control are the two main areas that need to be addressed. Finally, it presents a range of experiments that provide different practical approaches to these two core questions and utilize available game technology. The approach of these tests was to keep the rendering real-time – “liquid” – as long as possible. This follows original machinima-like production pipelines. Ultimately, the prototypes presented here illustrate the value of real-time game engines for pre-visualization as well as still prevailing limitations

Generic Drone Control Platform for Autonomous Capture of Cinema Scenes

The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool to produce more and more complex and aesthetic camera shots. However, the shooting process currently rely on manual control of the drones which makes it difficult and sometimes inconvenient to work with. In this paper we address the lack of autonomous system to operate generic rotary-wing drones for shooting purposes. We propose a global control architecture based on a high-level generic API used by many UAV. Our solution integrates a compound and coupled model of a generic rotary-wing drone and a Full State Feedback strategy. To address the specific task of capturing cinema scenes, we combine the control architecture with an automatic camera path planning approach that encompasses cinematographic techniques. The possibilities offered by our system are demonstrated through a series of experiments

Time and Space in Digital Game Storytelling

The design and representation of time and space are important in any narrative form. Not surprisingly there is an extensive literature on specific considerations of space or time in game design. However, there is less attention to more systematic analyses that examine both of these key factors—including their dynamic interrelationship within game storytelling. This paper adapts critical frameworks of narrative space and narrative time drawn from other media and demonstrates their application in the understanding of game narratives. In order to do this we incorporate fundamental concepts from the field of game studies to build a game-specific framework for analyzing the design of narrative time and narrative space. The paper applies this framework against a case analysis in order to demonstrate its operation and utility. This process grounds the understanding of game narrative space and narrative time in broader traditions of narrative discourse and analysis

Immunitary Gaming: Mapping the First-Person Shooter

Videogames have been theorised as an action-based medium. The original contribution to knowledge this thesis makes is to reconfigure this claim by considering popular multiplayer FPS games as reaction-based – particularly, immune reactions. I take up Roberto Esposito’s claim that the individual in contemporary biopolitics is defined negatively against the other, controlled and ultimately negated via their reactions to power’s capacity to incessantly generate threats. By inciting insecurity and self-protective gestures, FPS games like Activision’s Call of Duty franchise and EA’s Battlefield series vividly dramatise Esposito’s thought, producing an immunitary gaming. Immunitary Gaming locates the FPS within key moments of change as well as evolution in Western image systems including the emergence of linear perspective, cartography and the early years of the cinema. The FPS appropriates these image systems, but also alters their politics. Giorgio Agamben has argued that the apparatuses of late modernity no longer subjectify like their forebears, but desubjectify the individual, producing an impotent neoliberal body politic. I trace a similar development here. My work also seeks to capture the player’s movements via autoethnographic writing that communicates the viscerally and intensity of the experience. The FPS is framed as capable of giving insight into both the present and the future of our technological and political milieu and ‘sensorium,’ in Walter Benjamin’s terms. In its valorisation of the individual and production of insecurity to incite action, this project argues that the FPS is a symbolic form of immunitary neoliberal governmentality

Being Jacques Villeneuve: Formula One, 'Agency' and the Fan

DVD disc of supplementary material available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.In this thesis, I analyse my fandom for the Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve. Despite its rampant commercialism, innovative mediation, prestige and popular status within global sport, Formula One is surprisingly an under-researched topic in academia. Moreover, 'intense' fandom has often been stigmatised; at worst associating such individuals with pathological and obsessive behaviours or refuting their affections as merely symptomatic of the socio-economic forces that transform fans into duped consumers. This thesis argues against such simplistic disqualifications and reconceptualises fandom in light of how the structure/agency binary has itself been reconceptualised within media and cultural studies. Rather than privileging either the determining social, mediated and commercial structures, or championing the 'active agential' capacities of social individuals, Grossberg's notions of 'affect' and 'structured mobility' are drawn upon to underpin a more flexible explanation of contemporary fandom. In particular, affect offers theoretical purchase for how fans form attachments with selective media objects and why these come to 'matter' for specific individuals. Furthermore, by marrying affect with 'structured mobility', affective investments are recognised for their capacity to 'anchor' individuals in specific and concrete spatial/temporal 'moments' of social reality as they navigate both the mediated apparatus of the sport and the structured social, cultural and economic terrain that shapes their mediated fandom. Such insights are developed through a 'funnelling' approach in this thesis which moves from an examination of collective Formula One fandom to my own, exploring the affective traces of a friction that Villeneuve's maverick status provided within the broader machinery of the sport and to which this fan has responded